


It was night but never quiet.

by twiiinkle_toes



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Canon? Don't Know Her, F/F, More characters to come, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2020-03-29 16:34:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19023742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twiiinkle_toes/pseuds/twiiinkle_toes
Summary: An earthquake hits Republic City. Set before the events of the series. I don't really know where I'm gong with this tbh.





	1. Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Some not-super-important headcanons that are in this: Lin in left handed and her scars extend up to her eye, which is blinded.

It was night, and it was dark. Until the power plant was up and running at full capacity again, the only rooms to get electricity were the operating rooms, which meant that Lin was writing by candlelight. She held a pen in her right hand and meticulously—slowly, agonizingly _slowly_ —moved it across the page. Her results were shaky, frustrating. A siren whipped by on the street below and Lin leaned towards the window to try to get a look, but couldn’t even see the sidewalk from her position on the bed. She sighed. Her candle went out. She sighed a little harder. She sat in the dark and waited for her eye to adjust.

There was an almost constant stream of footsteps moving past the door. And voices, too. The sounds of people doing things. The tiny, tiny, very very small, irrational part of Lin’s brain was being particularly loud and annoying tonight. It felt like everyone except her was doing things to help. Except for newly-elected President Raiko. He kept getting in the way of everything.

Lin realized her eye had adjusted midway through scowling about how much Raiko vexed her for the third time that day. She carefully swung her legs off the side of the bed, her bare feet slapping softly against the cold tile floor. Earthquakes were the ultimate betrayal, Lin thought as she shuffled over to Kya’s desk. Her element, of which she was always in control, rebelling against her and toppling a building on her. There’s only so much one woman can do, Beifong or not. Lin took a short rest once she’d reached the desk. She’d almost held the damn thing up too, that was the worst part. 

 

_Lin Beifong grit her teeth and adjusted her stance. The sidewalk twisted up to support her ankles and her fingers clawed deeper into the wall. She could only feel a few more people in the building. They climbed out one at a time through a gap passersby had dug while Lin kept the whole place from collapsing. Her arms began to tremble and she scoffed at herself, offended that her limbs had the audacity to disobey. Sweat dripped down her neck. She wished she could turn off her ears, block out the screams and the sirens and just focus. Listen to the concrete. She remained as steady as she could, just another rock among the rubble, breathing as deeply as she could through the dust. Only three people left, then two. And then, of course, there was an aftershock._

_Lin lost her footing as the sidewalk jutted into a 45 degree angle and fell heavily onto her hands and knees. Before she could register what was happening the weight of the world landed on her back._

 

Lin grabbed three candles, realized she couldn’t carry all of them and the matchbox in one hand, scowled about how having only one hand sucked, put down the candles, picked one of them (and the matchbox) back up, and shuffled back to her cot, into which she sank. She stabbed the candle into the still wet corpse of its fallen brother. She looked at the matchbox. It sat square in the center of her lap desk, taunting her. She scowled at it.

Getting a match out wasn’t too much of a challenge. Lin set it on her desk next to its box. She reached out with her right hand, feeling around the room for some metal. There was only her uniform and a small sculpture of Huan’s on Kya’s desk. She contemplated the sculpture. Almost immediately Su’s voice rang through her head, saying something shrill about family and rudeness. It wasn’t even a good sculpture, the boy was only three years old. She’d spent some time staring at it and decided it was either a turtleduck or a bust of her sister. Why on earth she ever let Kya convince her to reconnect with her family she had no idea.

Lin had the matchbox bolted down to her desk with pieces of the left arm of her armor when Kya gently kicked open the door. She was haloed by the oil lanterns in the hall; visibly exhausted, and had been for the past two days. Her scrubs had been washed and disinfected so many times that they’d become starchy and faded, and the bags under her eyes were a darker shade of brown-ish purple every time Lin saw her. Not that Lin was looking any better herself. Her left shoulder and the mere inches of her arm that remained were heavily bandaged. Bruises dotted pretty much her entire body, and the skin of her right hip was still red and raw from where it had been forcibly healed shut.

 

_Lin opened her eyes. They were unfocused and watery, adding to the haze already provided by the swirling, settling dust. She felt more than saw people scrambling around like panicked ants, clambering over pieces of fallen building, looking for a way out of this nightmare. A few people weren’t running. A few people weren’t moving. Lin pulled her attention back to herself. She couldn’t help those people now. She could barely even breathe. Or move, for that matter. She was lying face down in some mud, which was weird because it hadn’t rained for weeks. Why did it smell like that? Oh, shit._

_The building had fallen on her. On her arm, mostly. Lin knew that was a lost cause almost immediately. It was the source of most of the blood creating the mud she was lying in, and, now that her brain was catching up with her eye, a fucking ton of pain. She closed her eyes and fought back a scream, but before she could do anything else she felt a release of pressure and a blast of hot summer air on the smashed remains of her arm. Someone had lifted a chunk of building off her. And then they threw up. Lin glanced over and almost threw up herself at the sight of shards of her own bone sticking out of her skin. She tried to push herself up, to get away, to run and hide and lick her wounds. She couldn’t._

_A huge iron beam had impaled her hip, pinning her to the earth. Lin choked out a few tears and pounded the earth with a bloodied fist, for once in an act not of earthbending but of desperation._

 

“Morning,” Lin said. 

“Is it morning already?” Kya squinted at the wall clock behind Lin’s cot. 4am. Her shoulders fell at the revelation. “Ugh.”

“I know the feeling,” Lin said. 

She brought Lin a few more candles to light, and then placed them around the room before closing the door. Lin put her lap desk on the floor next to her cot and pat the mattress. Kya sank into bed for the first time in over 24 hours.


	2. Cold

It was night, and it was cold. The heating, like the lights, had yet to come back online. It really was amazing how it could manage to be so sweltering during the day and yet so cold at night. Lin reluctantly wriggled out of Kya’s embrace. She tucked the blanket around the waterbender once she was standing, and wrapped her overcoat around her own body. She looked at her cane propped up in the corner. Damn building. Damn earthquake. She grabbed the cane and hobbled into the hallway. Doctors and nurses bustled back and forth, looking as tired as Lin felt. Some trudged along with a steaming cup of something caffeinated, others straight up ran to the next emergency demanding their attention. Lin flattened herself against the wall to let a frazzled doctor trailed by three medical students race by. 

It was night, but that didn’t mean anything these days. No one had time to rest anymore. Lin dragged herself into the break room. Varrick was already there, of course. Prompt, surprisingly, even during the apocalypse. Well, the apocalypse is perhaps a little hyperbolic, but Lin felt she deserved the exaggeration considering the week she’s had. He had brought two thermoses of tea. God bless this man. (Now there was a though Lin never thought she’d have.) It really was the simple things. 

Lin sat at the table and wordlessly took a thermos, nodding at Varrick. His face flickered uncertainly in the candlelight and his eyes flickered uncertainly at Lin’s bandaged shoulder. The bandages were old; they were running low. 

 

_Lin’s ears were ringing. She wasn’t sure if it was because of the noise or the shock. A voice was calling for help, for a healer, for a metalbender, and although Lin knew it belonged to the figure standing above her—was that Bumi’s friend? small world—it sounded as if it had traveled through miles and miles of water. An indiscernible amount of time passed while Lin laid in a puddle of her own blood and rubble. Bumi’s friend kept trying to stop the bleeding from her arm. His name was… Tsomo? That sounded right. The pain faded away, and so did her vision, both optical and seismic, her world slowly, blissfully, shrinking and disappearing._

_Time slogged through the mud just as Tsomo did, carrying her towards the field hospital in the park. There’s a field hospital in the park? How long have I been out? How long have I been losing blood? She blinked and she was on a stretcher and then on a blanket on the ground and then two healers were kneeling above her and then she was wearing bandages instead of a shirt._

 

“It’s way better than it was before,” Lin said in a low voice. There were a couple nurses sleeping at the other table. Varrick nodded curtly. He was being suspiciously courteous; it put Lin on edge. He picked up the stack of papers in front of him and passed them to Lin. 

“I’ve got a biologist to look at these but before we get anything started I’d like for Kya to check ‘em out, as a fellow waterbender,” he said.

“And one of the world’s foremost waterbending healers,” Lin said. Varrick waved his hand dismissively. He stood to leave and pushed the other thermos towards Lin.

“For Kya, from Zhu Li.” Ah, that was it then.


	3. Raining

It was night, and it was raining. It wasn’t until just now, looking out the window, that Lin realized Varrick had called himself a bender. She mused this thought aloud, which made her wife roll her eyes. Kya meticulously looked through Varrick’s blueprints, muttering to herself about how intensely the man annoyed her. Capitalist this, bad image that. Tenzin was here too, for some reason, talking at Lin about his newly pregnant wife. Didn’t he have other things to do? From what she’s heard Aunt Katara and Uncle Sokka had arrived today. They’d need a proper briefing, and as much as it loathed her to admit it, even just to herself, Lin was not in the proper state for such things. Nor did she have the time. Chief kept sending her paperwork to do.

“Which,” Lin again mused aloud, interrupting the airbender mid-sentence, “I’m supposed to be doing right now.”

“What?” said Tenzin.

“Paperwork.”

“That’s really what you think we should name our child?” Tenzin asked. 

“What? I don’t care what you name it. I have work to do.”

“Shouldn’t you be greeting Mom and Uncle Sokka?” Kya asked. Tenzin did not turn to face his sister.

“They’ll just want to talk about the avatar,” he said.

“Normally I would agree with you,” Kya said, “But I think for the moment they’ll be more focused on the almost total destruction of the city they helped to build and the upheaval of the lives of hundreds of thousands of its citizens, including Junior Chief here and myself. Get your ass to work like the rest of us.”

“Right as always, oh sister of mine,” Tenzin said. He stood, and tossed Kya a tired glare before taking his leave.

 

_Lin tasted blood. She must’ve bit down on her tongue. She couldn’t feel it; it seemed as if every nerve in her body converged on her ruined arm. Light glinted off the saw in the doctor’s hands. No, no no nononono, she needed that arm, she wouldn’t be able to bend right with only one arm. She tried to get up, but then there were hands on her shoulders and legs and arms. All the body parts swirled together, and soon she couldn’t tell which limbs were hers and which weren’t. Hopefully the bloody mass didn’t belong to her, it looked like they were about to cut it off from the amalgamation of other body parts. Lin tried to spit out the blood in her mouth but it turned into a dry, scratchy cloth. She tried to spit that out too, but she felt a thin metal saw—steel—slice into her arm. She screamed and tried again to escape but her own hands were holding her down and she couldn’t untangle them. The edges of her vision grew red and she felt her arm thunk onto the floor. She still tasted blood._


End file.
